Festus, Missouri

I even didn't start 7th grade until about 6 weeks into the semester, because we were camped out at Howard Johnson's in St. Louis looking for a suitable rental. But I got a real education the short time we lived in Festus, Missouri, until partway through 8th grade. The name of the school I went to there was Jefferson R-7. We had a very strict principal; boys were not allowed to wear T-shirts, and all shirttails were to be tucked in! The PE teacher was strict too. We were the Blue Jays, undefeated in girls volleyball, probably boys basketball too. Yes, all we did was play volleyball during gym class, but first he made us do push-ups on our fingertips. No, I was not on the volleyball team. For a while I was the “new kid”. I made up for that by getting good grades and making up rude songs about certain nasty classmates. The fact that I wasn't embarrassed to loudly sing uncomplimentary solos to my classmates helped them to let me in to their circle maybe...I don't know.
Anyway, my parents found us a really neat house to live in. I can't remember this address either, It was something like RR #1 etc, I can't remember, but yes, rural. The landlord, a doctor, was a retired army colonel. He was like an feudal land baron. His house was a log cabin type structure on the top of a hill and he told us he owned all land we could see from there.
“Our” house was an old two story farm house, whose cellar housed a Missouri Terrapin. The nearest and only neighbors, (besides the landlord, Dr. Allbee, who lived up a terribly steep hill to the left of our driveway) were – we'll call them the McCornicks. A family with 5 adolescent kids including Ma and Pa. The oldest was a daughter, Candy; she got married to Hell's Angel candidate while we lived there. Then there was Roy, named after his dad. I remember that Roy Jr. and his best friend, “Melonhead” signed up for the Army. Later, after Roy and Melonhead had been home for an inordinately long Christmas leave, I learned from his little bother Paulie what AWOL means. There were two other girls, Renee and Theresa.
This family all lived in a single wide mobile home with no skirting around it. Their big old black and white dog, King, and an adopted stray pup would huddle under there in bad weather. Next to the the mobile home was an old rectangular concrete foundation of an old shed or something. That was their garbage dump. I'm pretty sure we didn't put our garbage up there because our house and yard had a low white board fence around it. Periodically this garbage was theoretically burned, but finally the day came when my dad helped Mr. Roy McCornick shovel it all into a trailer to be hauled off. That upset the food chain a bit because the mice that had been recycling the garbage and using it for food, heat and shelter had to find another place to live and something else to eat. I've witnessed lemmings on the run, and this was about the same idea – dozens of mice fleeing. The cats were so surprised at first they just sort of stood around and watched.
Our house had three entrances, a front door with a wide cozy porch for warm summer evenings and on each side of the kitchen were doors into back yard. We almost always came and went through the kitchen door, because it was a straight shot to the garage and the rabbit hutches. The white board fence had a gate there; beside the gate was a pipe that stuck about how many inches up out of the ground...four inches? I never paid much attention to that pipe, but one day I noticed something white in a bit of gunk that seemed to have collected at the mouth of this pipe-whatever-it-was-thing. If you looked hard enough it almost looked like a toothy grin.
I was too busy being Heidi of the Alps, and Huckleberry Finn and Caddie Woodlawn to pay much attention to details like that, until Renee or Theresa told me and my brother about a tragedy that had happened at their house. Ma, or one of those girls, I can't remember, had been so sick and vomiting and stuff all day, and had lost her partial in the toilet and the dentists charge so much that they didn't know what they were gonna do. And just like that it clicked, and one of us, my brother or I, had a “plumbing-needs-ventilation-revelation” and realized that that grin in the gunk could really be someone's pearly whites. We got a stick and poked around...yep, all we need is to rinse these off and soak 'em bleach and they'll be as good as new!
Don't forget the location of the rabbit hutches, they may come up in this blog again...